some seventy years had passed since this invention of hers, and Hildegart had been forced to see her brilliant scheme degenerating. Somehow the Hospitaller corps, this kindly order of medical monks, had transformed itself into the most violent, fanatical soldiery in the Crusader forces. It seemed that their skills in healing injured flesh and bone also gave them a special advantage in chopping men apart. Even the Templars were scared of the Hospitallers, and the Templars frightened Assassins so badly that the Assassins often paid them for protection.
Some of the barns in the smashed village were still defensible. Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain and the Ayatollah of Assassins, ordered his caravan to put up for the night. The caravan men made camp, buried several abandoned corpses, set up sentries, and struggled to water the horses with the tainted murk from the well.
The Abbess and the Assassin settled down behind their armed sentries, to eat and chat. Hildegart and Sinan had known each other for much longer than most people would ever live. Despite the fact that they both labored loyally for the Silent Master, their personal relations were rather strained. There had been times in her long, long life when Hildegart had felt rather safe and happy with Sinan. Sinan was an ageless Moslem wizard and therefore evil incarnate, but Sinan had once sheltered her from men even more dangerous than himself.
Those pleasant years of their history, unfortunately, were long behind both of them. At the age of one hundred seventeen, Sinan could not possibly protect Hildegart from any man more dangerous than himself, for Sinan the Assassin had become the most dangerous man in the world. The number of Crusaders who had fallen to his depredations was beyond all reckoning, though Hildegart shrewdly estimated it at somewhere over four thousand.
Underlit by red flames from his dainty iron camp stove, Sinan ate his roasted kabobs and said little. He offered her a warm, dark, gazelle-eyed look. Hildegart stirred uneasily in her dark riding cloak, hood, and wimple. Although Sinan was very intelligent and had learned a great deal about inflicting terror, Sinan's heart never changed much with the passing decades. He was always the same. Sinan was simple, direct, and devout in his habits, and he prayed five times every day, which (by Hildegart's reckoning) would likely make some two hundred thousand acts of prayer, every one of them involving a fervent hope that Crusaders would perish and burn in Hell.
Hildegart warmed one chilly hand at the iron brazier. Nearby, the homing pigeons cooed in their portable cribs. The poor pigeons were cold and unhappy, even more anxious to return to Tyre than she was. Perhaps they sensed that Sinan's mercenaries longed to pluck and eat them. “Sinan, where did you find this horrible band of cutthroats?'
'I bought them for us, my dear,” Sinan told her politely. “These men are Khwarizmian Turks from the mountains far beyond Samarkand. They are quite lost here in Palestine, without any land or loyalties. Therefore they are of use to me, and to our Silent Master, and to his purposes.'
'Do you trust these bandy-legged fiends?'
'No, I don't trust them at all. But they speak only an obscure dialect, and unlike you and me, they are not People of the Book. So they cannot ever reveal what they may see of our Silent Master. Besides, the Khwarizmian Turks were cheap to purchase. They flee a great terror, you see. They flee the Great Khan of the Mongols.'
Hildegart considered these gnomic remarks. Sinan wasn't lying. Sinan never lied to her; he was just grotesquely persistent in his pagan delusions. “Sinan, do I need to know more about terrible Great Khan?'
'Better not to contemplate such things, my pearl of wisdom. Let's play a game of chess.'
'Not this time, no.'
'Why be coy? I'll spot you an elephant rook!'
'My markets for Chinese silk have been very disturbed these past ten years. Is this so-called Great Khan the source of my commercial difficulty?'
Sinan munched thoughtfully at his skewer of peppered mutton. Her remarks had irritated him. Brave men killed and died at Sinan's word, and yet she, Hildegart, was far richer than he was. Hildegart was the richest woman in the world. As the founder, accountant, banker, and chief moneylender of the Hospitaller order, Hildegart found her greatest joy in life managing international markets. She placed her money into goods and cities where it would create more money, and then she counted that money with great and precise care, and she placed it again. Hildegart had been doing this for decades, persistently and secretly, through a network of nameless agents in cities from Spain to India, a network linked by swift birds and entirely unsuspected by mankind.
Sinan knew how all this counting and placing of money was done, but as an Ayatollah of Assassins, he considered it boring and ignoble labor. That was why he was always sending her messenger birds and begging her for loans of cash.
'Dear, kind, sweet Hudegar,” the Assassin said coaxingly.
Hildegart blushed. “No one calls me Hudegar. Except for you, they all died ages ago.'
'Dear Hudegar, how could I ever forget my sweet pet name for you?'
'That was a slave girl's name.'
'We're all the slaves of God, my precious! Even our Silent Master.” Sinan yanked the metal skewer from his strong white teeth. “Are you too proud to obey his summons now, blessed Mother Superior? Are you tired of your long life, now that your Christian Franks are finally chased back into the sea by the warriors of righteousness?'
'I'm here with you, aren't I?” said Hildegart, avoiding his eyes. “I could be tending the wounded and doing my accounts. Why did you write to me in French? The whole convent's chattering about your mysterious bird and its message. You know how women talk when they've been cloistered.'
'You never answer me when I write to you in Arabic,” Sinan complained. He mopped at his fine black beard with a square of pink Chinese silk. “I write to you constantly! You know the cost of shipping these homing pigeons! Their flesh is more precious than amber!” The Assassin waved away the thickening smoke from the coals of his cookstove.
Hildegart lit the sesame oil at the spout of a small brass lamp. “I do write to you, dear Sinan, with important financial news, but in return, you write to me of nothing but your evil boasting and your military mayhem.'
'I'm composing our history there!” Sinan protested. “I am putting my heart's blood into those verses, woman! You of all women should appreciate that effort!'
'Oh, very well then.” Hildegart switched to Arabic, a language she knew fluently, thanks to her years as a captive concubine.
''With the prodigies of my pen I express the marvel of the fall of Jerusalem,'” she quoted at him. “'I fill the towers of the Zodiac with stars, and the caskets with my pearls of insight. I spread the joyful news far and wide, bringing perfume to Persia and conversation to Samarkand. The sweetness of holy victory surpasses candied fruits and cane sugar.’”
'How clever you are, Hudegar! Those were my finest verses, too.” Sinan's dark, arching brows knotted hopefully. “That's some pretty grand stuff there, isn't it?'
'You shouldn't try to be a poet, Sinan. Let's face it, you are an alchemist.'
'But I've learned everything there is to know about chemistry and machinery,” Sinan protested. “Those fields of learning are ignoble and boring. Poetry and literature, by contrast, are fields of inexhaustible knowledge! Yes, I admit it, I do lack native talent for poesy-for when I began writing, my history was just a dry recital of factual events! But I have finally found my true voice as a poet, for I have mastered the challenge of narrating great deeds on the battlefield!'
Hildegart's temper rose. “Am I supposed to praise you for that? I had investments in Jerusalem, you silly block of wood! My best sugar presses were there-my favorite cotton dyes… and you can bet I'll tell the Blemmye all about those severe commercial losses!'
'You may quote me even further, and recite to him how Christian Jerusalem fell to the Moslems in flames and screams,” said Sinan tautly. “Tell him that every tribe of Frank will be chased back into the ocean! Eighty-nine long years since these unbathed wretches staggered in from Turkey to steal our lands, looking like so many disinterred corpses! But at last, broken with righteous fire and sword, the occupiers flee the armies of Jihad like whipped dogs. Never to return! I have lived through all of that humiliation, Hudegar. I was forced to witness every sorrowful day of my people's long affliction. At last, in this glorious day of supreme justice, I will see the backs of those alien invaders. Do you know what I just heard Saladin say?'
Hildegart ate another salted olive. She had been born in Germany and had never gotten over how delicious olives were. “All right. What did he say?'
'Saladin will build ships and sail after the retreating Christians to Europe. ” Sinan drew an amazed breath. “Can you imagine the stern qualities of that great soldier, who would trust to the perils of the open ocean to avenge our
